Tim Adams - How our capacity for wonder was challenged by the black hole image
It says something
about our historical moment – or about the intrinsic limits of our capacity for
wonder – that the image of this physical reality is so effortlessly normalised.
We probably do less stargazing, as a species, than at any previous moment in
human history, but the old reflex to anthropomorphise the universe, to insist
on ourselves in the centre of it, persists...As TS Eliot observed
in his meditation on Einstein’s space-time continuum in Burnt Norton,
“humankind cannot bear too much reality”. The science proves the black hole is
way beyond most of our understanding, but the evidence now in front of our eyes
reminds us that the simplest principle of the universe remains the hardest for
us to grasp: it’s not about us.
A few years ago, during a period of insomnia, I briefly got into the habit of contributing to the online project Galaxy Zoo. I would log on to a website that presented, one after another, singular images of tens of thousands of galaxies observed by the Hubble telescope, each billions of light years away. There were so many of these images that cosmologists had opened them up to thousands of amateur volunteers to help narrow down the field of those galaxies that warranted closer study.
Peering at my dimmed
computer screen in the early hours, at catherine wheels of stars that perhaps
no human eye had ever seen, I ticked the relevant boxes that would assist in
classifying them – “elliptical or spiral?”; “smooth or fuzzy?” – and then
paused for a while over the open-ended final question: “Is there anything odd
in this image?” (An inquiry that always seemed to beg the reply: “You mean,
beyond the fact that it is a rotating mass of incalculable solar systems that
likely expired untold millions of years ago?”)... read more:
